My working life began in places like half-addresses, gardening, clipping, pulling dead jacaranda leaves from a kidney shaped planter box edged in brick along a stuccoed garage wall under a cooling gray while my transistor radio quietly played its endless rotation of Top Forty singles. Other high school friends actually had to meet the public,…
I liked to think of Aunt Nancy’s musical gift pausing for a generation in one of her female forebears along the New River – they’d been there since before the revolution – a little girl in the 1830s perhaps, in a butternut shift and bonnet pattering along a trail at the top of Doe Run…
A certain eccentricity ran among the three closest sisters of my grandmother’s family, Nell, Sue and Evelyn, and quirky stories followed each of them through their lives. In her one room school in the 1890s, on the Illinois prairie, Nell developed a taste for mischief and a discerning eye for the absurd. She enjoyed watching…